


If You Can't Beat 'Em....

by fortunatelykeendetective



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Birth description, Fluff, M/M, Medical Procedures, Mischievous Toddler, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are Parents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 00:47:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5354555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fortunatelykeendetective/pseuds/fortunatelykeendetective
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Very silly slice-of-life parentlock drabble that I have no idea where it came from. I don't even have a parentlock headcanon. Just, writing for a prompt and one idea led to another and this is what happened. Read at your own risk and don't say I didn't warn you about the silliness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Can't Beat 'Em....

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 25 Days of Ficmas by hudders-and-hiddles  
> Day 4 Prompt: Christmas Cards

_Lillian Margaret Watson-Holmes_! John’s exasperated voice rang out in their flat for at least the tenth time that week.

John had been a combat surgeon, operating on horribly burnt and injured men in the dark, with incoming mortars, and in very unsterile circumstances. He’d followed Sherlock on all manner of stakeouts, chases, and high-intensity cases where neither was sure they'd come out alive. Nothing had prepared him for parenting the precocious auburn-haired cerulean-eyed toddler currently pulling every square of toilet paper into the off the roll and into the toilet and leaning into the bowl to make sure the paper had reached its destination.

 _Ah, well….may as well get a snapshot for posterity_ , mused her father.

Her entrance to the world had been quite the event, what with Molly’s 27-hour labour followed by two minutes which felt like an eternity in which her shoulder was lodged in Molly’s pelvis. Fortunately, the midwives coached Molly to flip to hands and knees at which point they were able to manoeuver the baby out, and no one was surprised when she tipped the scales at 10lb 7oz. Such was her entrance; like her dad Sherlock, she was virtually born standing up and talking back. The husbands should have known then that she'd be quite the force to be reckoned with.

They’d never figured out a way to properly thank Molly Hooper for agreeing to be donate her eggs _and_ be their surrogate, but if Molly’s honest about it seeing the two of them finally together and so squishily enamoured of one another, well….it was payment enough.

Currently the two-year-old firecracker John and Sherlock call Lily cuts a smirk at her father whilst standing in the bathroom, knowing that because she is so stunningly beautiful even when naughty, she is likely to get away with the lightest of consequences. John just can’t bring himself to be anything but indulgent with this beauty who is the spitting image of Sherlock Holmes.

And Sherlock? Forget it. From the second he laid eyes on her as Molly delivered her, squishy-headed and covered in vernix, blood, and the slime of birth, Sherlock Holmes was never so in love with another soul as he was the day his daughter was born. Forget Sherlock being _any sort of disciplinarian at all._

Imagine no one’s surprise when Holmes-Watson Christmas cards that year eschewed the traditional formal color-coordinated posed portrait. For Christmas that year, all loved ones received a snapshot of Lily wearing only a nappy and her two fathers posed beside her, one smooching each cheek. All three pretending to unravel toilet paper into the bowl.

**Author's Note:**

> The hands-and-knees procedure I described really is the go-to of many midwives when a baby's shoulder gets stuck under the mother's pelvic bone on the way out (a medical emergency called shoulder dystocia). It's called the Gaskin manoever, named after the American midwife Ina May Gaskin who began teaching it widely in the US. In her book Spiritual Midwifery, she says she learned it from Central American lay midwives, who told her they learned it from God.


End file.
